The flawed album Tom Petty was always proud of
Not many artists can see the full picture of what they were trying to make until it’s already finished. People can try slaving away for ages, trying to work out the perfect drum part, or seeing what they can do with just the bare essentials, but once all of the overdubs come in, it’s easy to spot what they were going for all along. While Tom Petty is usually the malevolent dictator who rules over the Heartbreakers, he admitted that one of his proudest achievements was surviving the album Southern Accents.
Because going into the record, the entire band had made a grave error when it came time for them to get into the studio. They had been going on the tour-and-album rollercoaster for years now, but heading off the road isn’t the antidote to inspiration. If anything, you can get into a lot of trouble after living like a drifter and then suddenly be left to your own devices.
And now that the group were all stagnant, that meant picking up a massive cocaine problem amid everything. So we had a band that wasn’t practised with plans to make an album that would be a double record full of all-new material telling the story of the American South. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, if there was a checklist of what shouldn’t happen during an album’s production, they pretty much checked every box. Looking through their history, Petty talked about stragglers showing up to the studio unannounced, everyone nodding off trying to find the right sound for a song, and then how he accidentally broke his hand in a fit of frustration when they couldn’t get a song right.
So with all of that going against it, can someone explain to me why this is the group’s best album since Damn the Torpedoes? It’s definitely not the double album that they foresaw it as, but looking at the track listing, the title track is absolutely spellbinding, and when combined with the insanity of ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ and the poignant country-leaning ‘The Best of Everything’, it seemed like Petty had reached the height of his power amid all of that grief.
Compared to the countless sleepless nights that came of the record, Petty still considered Southern Accents to be one of his best achievements as an artist, recalling in Runnin’ Down a Dream, “Southern Accents isn’t the record that I set out to make, but I like the record that it became. As soon as we went bacon the road and cut that shit out, everything was back to normal.”
It’s not like Petty sounded like he was at the bottom of his game, either. The textures from Dave Stewart from Eurythmics are still some of the weirdest moments in his catalogue, and despite the headaches, the title track was good enough for Johnny Cash to eventually take a swing at it when crafting his country-rock hybrid album, Unchained.
Petty probably would have traded all of the headaches away if it meant just getting the album that he got, but sometimes you have to go through those hardships to realise what you’re made of. It’s not easy, but most artists come out on the other side as a much stronger person for it.
